Valkyrie Elysium has a certain charm to it. Like a game you'd get on the ps3 during a sale for 9.99 or something thrown on Games With Gold you'd randomly play over the weekend. Its a game that very much feels like it's a generation (or maybe even two) too late. In that sense it made me feel a little nostalgic for simpler times and has a bit of a cozy vibe. But the faux nostalgia isnt a half measure, this game comes with all the cons that have been ironed out in the years since those "simpler times" and it drags the game down a lot. This may very well be one of the most 3/5 games you'll ever play - but that isn't a bad thing.

Valkyrie Elysium's combat is the highlight. Its got lots of spells, elemental teammates you can summon and a decent if small amount of weapons with their own movesets at your disposal. It also has a grappling hook of sorts and lets be honest basically every game that adds one of those gets a free ticket to being awesome. In the rough sea of questionable design that makes up Valkyrie Elysium, its combat is a lovely little island in the center. But as the game goes on, its sands begin to erode.

It took me roughly 23 hours to beat Valkyrie Elysium. This is having done all 9 main quests as well as all 36 subquests. The combat keeps things together but quite frankly everything else is falling apart. The boss designs are dope but most of the normal enemies you'll encounter are the same few fellas with elemental reskins. The locations, while sometimes visually unique from eachother, still feel and play the same. There is nothing else to this game but the combat and slight exploration. There are a few so called puzzles but theyre really just summoning one of your party members to do something for you. That means the vast majority of this game you'll be fighting the same bundle of dull enemies through very familiar feeling levels over and over and over and over again. This does give this game a mindless nature to it, I was able to catch up on a lot of youtube. It was a good time to just turn my brain off and relax. But a great combat system can only take you so far. I believe even if you didnt go for every sub quest like I did - if you dont have something else on while you play this you'd probably get bored before the end.

There's also the story. Well, kinda. They try at some points. I think all of the characters are interesting but its all surface level, even during their quests they dont really get fleshed out very well. I got the true ending which was quite lengthy but honestly pretty satisfying. I never particularly cared for what was going on in this game but theres an interesting twist and idk, even if its forgettable and hardly existent at least it didnt have a shitty ending. There are actually four endings but seeing as you have to fight all the bosses for the true ending I didn't really feel the need to. Actually thats not entirely true. I did go back to attempt the others for trophies, but one of the bosses has four fucking phases and so when I died on the last one I decided nevermind and promptly deleted the game. That leads us to our next segment.

Playing on normal wasnt particularly hard. You are given a lot to work with its kinda hard to fail, but when the game wants to be challenging it does it in the unfun way. High HP enemies that do an annoying amount of damage. This wasnt too bad as it wasnt an often occurrence but thats just one of many small things that hold the game back even beyond its bland level and enemy design. It actually in fact has a pretty good and well spaced upgrade system but honestly thats the only other thing this does well. You gain proficiency with weapons the more you use them but I never noticed if it actually affected anything. Its a very slow grind to max proficiency too, when you've done everything the game has to offer but not everything fully upgraded is a pretty eye rolling experience. There is a hub area between levels but its entirely useless except for accepting a few quests, saving and starting said quests. Theres not even an item shop. If you want to get items you have to jump into a level and hope you find what you want in a chest. The problem is, you have to fully complete a level to keep any progress made. And if you wanna get some lost collectibles or find quests in the main levels, thats right. You have to replay them in their entirety. And most of the main missions are dragged out to at least an hour. I had to replay far more of the game than I would of liked simply because I missed a subquest at the very beginning of a level. This kind of design even seeps into its trophy lists. There are plenty of trophies that wont unlock until you beat the level. Even a few that if you get inbetween levels, you have to go enter one and beat that for it to unlock. And even better, the difficulty trophies dont stack. So if your first playthrough is on hard you're gonna have to play it again on normal. Whats better is there is no new game plus so you'll have to start from scratch is well. Theres so many little things like that in the game that really put into perspective the low budget and general unfinished feeling of the game.

In the end, Valkyrie is a mixed bag. Its perfectly average, in some ways a devolution but its saved by its really fun core combat. In nearly every way possible, Valkyrie Elysium is not a good game. But I'm okay with that. Sometimes you just need a mediocre experience to get you through the day. Keep your mind of things. Thats exactly what this was for me. I wouldnt recommend this for full price like I bought it, but if you see it on sale and need some downtime, I think this is a pretty perfect game for that.

Thanks for reading everyone <3

Trophy Completion - 77% (37/46)
Time Played: 23 hours roughly
Nancymeter - 62/100
Game Completion #135 of 2022
November Completion #1

Borderlands has always been a franchise I was pretty fond of. Many playthroughs of 1&2 were a core part of my gaming childhood and while I've played those so much that the thought of doing them again is dreadful I will always appreciate my time with them. Later entries have previously gotten weaker and weaker but still pretty good by my book. Seeing a new direction for the series sounded like a great idea, and Tiny Tina of course is one of the better characters. So I was very hopeful for this. Unfortunately I believe Tiny Tina's Wonderlands the weakest yet.

The premise of this is great. Borderlands 2 had some awesome dlcs and Bunkers & Badasses was the pretty clear standout. I have never had any interest in tabletop games but the way they try to translate it to the game is fun and a good expansion on the original dlc. The overworld is the biggest divergence from mainline and for the most part its a neat way to get across the map. A lot of optional dungeons you can do for loot or to collect shrine pieces which if you find all the pieces for a certain shrine will give you a nice bonus. But this overworld has a critical flaw with how it spawns enemies. You can punch them and they'll vanish but if you're distracted (they usually spawn really close) You'll get sucked into an entire combat arena with multiple enemies and no chance to escape. None of these fights are hard or worth the exp though so it is just a forced waste of time. This is especially annoying in co-op. They pop up so often that halfway through the game it had completely soured me on the concept of the overworld.

Speaking of co-op, oof man. I played the entirety of this in co-op with my boyfriend and I think the game would of been very boring without that but jesus christ I am not even exagerating when I said this game crashed on me probably at least fifty separate times over our playthrough. Nearly all of these crashes were upon me opening my menu. I'll tell you, playing an rpg and being too scared to open your fucking inventory was very annoying. I'm not sure what caused this but it definitely dropped my enjoyment considerably. Although, I can't really say Id have much better thoughts about it otherwise.

The combat in this is fine, it's mostly standard borderlands. Melee weapons get to be improved a little and now you can combine two classes of your choosing but I didn't get much use out of either. When battles are hectic and you have the right gear its a good gameplay loop, but thats typical for the series. You use spells instead of grenades which can be fun as well but its really a mix bag. There is a staggering amount of loot dropped in this game but basically all of it is useless. You can find die across the levels to supposedly increase your luck but these were almost always worthless as well. We got some pretty strong weapons now and then but everything is basically junk and only worth selling. But the prices for inventory upgrades and spacing out of vending machines just makes everything feel like a really unnecessary hassle. Combine that with levels and sidequests that just drag on and on, this was an experience that was pretty dull for most of its run time. What makes all of that infinitely worse though is that strangely so much of this game has like absolutely zero music? The bgm is just straight up non existent except for the same handful of songs in battles or towns now and then. It's really damn noticeable. Of course there is a bigger reason why all of these feel as long as they are.

The story sucks. Tina is great obviously and there's some fun performances from Andy Samberg and Will Arnett but wow man. There is basically a new character introduced every mission and all of them are very forgettable. The game did make me laugh out loud a few times but so much of it had me stonefaced. The humor of the first few games was dumb but it was the right kind of dumb and now with this and Borderlands 3 it just feels painful. The bigger this franchise has become (and especially in this with the absence of Anthony Burch), the writing quality has dropped significantly and his absence is incredibly noticeable. The side quests arent much better. Some are fun concepts like exploring a house while shrunken but most of them are just glorified fetch quests with you guessed it, more annoying and forgettable characters guiding you through. One saving grace though is that the levels from an aesthetic standpoint are really great, especially the dried out deep trenches - most locations look really pretty and fits the setting quite well.

In the end, I have a lot of negative opinions on this game, probably more than the positive ones so maybe my rating feels a bit generous, but idk. I can feel that they really wanted to try with this. There is some passion in there its not all just gearbox greed. That's what I want to believe, at least. There's a message from the devs in the credits that talks about tough development because of COVID. The message kinda reads like a copout, a little pleading face emoji to say please forgive us for not making a good game. I want to believe its genuine. Apparently this game sold well enough that its gonna become its own franchise. I guess we'll have to see.

Borderlands was a series that me and my dad played together a lot, and I have good memories of the times with him. We're not on speaking terms at the moment and quite frankly I doubt we'll ever be. In a way that sours all my memories, makes me sad to look back on them and know its never gonna be like that again. It can't be. Playing this with @Assenemy helped with that a lot I think. Despite the crashes and the dragged out levels and the dead silent bgm, I had a really good time playing this even if we had to make our own fun by making fun of what was happening or doing silly things like cancelling fast travel or going up an elevator without the other person. I will always be appreciative of this game for that. I look forward to the future of this series and making new Borderlands memories, as silly as it or they may be.

Thanks for reading <3

Trophy Completion - 79% (35/39)
Time Played: 36 hours 9 minutes
Nancymeter - 64/100
Game Completion #132 of 2022
October Completion #9

I remember trying the free demo for Bayonetta way back in 2009 on my friend's Xbox 360 and, being dogshit at these types of combo-driven hack-n-slash games, struggled with the tutorial alone and left it at that... Fool ;-;

Playing this recently (and more importantly, playing this after DMCV) it definitely feels dated tbh. Which is about as much as I'd expected really, but makes it hard to score any higher because the longer I spent playing it, the more I wanted to get back to the not-playing. Not because it wasn't fun, by any stretch, I just preferred the everything else so much more.

Unfortunately for me, I'm still ass at hack-n-slash games, so I tried my hand at playing this on normal and I wasn't exactly struggling, it just felt like I went down too fast and everything else too slow, so I dropped it to easy in order to move things along a bit. Immediately after, I was having a much better time, feeling cool and less like my time was being wasted. But as I played on it was almost too far on the other end of the scale. My hand was being held so much that it felt like I only had to mash buttons and even bosses would fall in no time at all. To think there's an even easier setting as well!
Another issue I had was that because Easy automatically finishes combos for you, I kept trying to replicate what I was doing on Normal, only for the game to use a different attack pattern that I guess was more appropriate? Just felt like I had a bit less control, in a negative way as well as a positive one.
This is hardly the game's fault, but it's a shame I wasn't able to find a difficulty that was both challenging and fun, hopefully the sequels improve on that.

Aside from the combat, the levels themselves were just, so 2009... On-rails bike levels, an entire level where you're piloting a missile and shooting identical waves of enemies for near 5 minutes, god I really hope they ditch or tone those down as well lol. The set pieces were fantastic I will say, but so much of the game felt drawn out or prolongued and when the levels are only 5-15 mins each anyway they shouldn't really feel like they're dragging. The worst case of this was the final boss, which ends with a far-too-long sequence of just maneuvering something for what must have been 20-30 seconds of avoiding obstacles. The climax was so awesome why drag it out so long!? D':

With that said, Bayonetta is undeniably deserving of its status and following because the characters are just so goddamn lovable. Bayo herself carried the game with ease and the overall campy tone worked perfectly to keep me interested and wanting more from a plot that was honestly just.. I don't even know lol it wasn't exactly confusing but at the same time it felt like there were pieces of information missing that everyone knew but me. I'm gunna have to watch a smarter person explain all the shit I missed, but at the same time credit to the game for making me care regardless of what was going on.

In conclusion, Bayonetta is a PS3 game, and it's got all the rust and clunk to prove it. But nothing can take away from just how charismatic it is. I can confidently say that even though I barely followed the plot and I'm only giving it 4/5 stars, I am absolutely excited to play the 2nd one :)

Easily the best of the anthology in my opinion. The usual slow start in the early chapters being prep for a military operation in enemy territory does a great job of not actually feeling like a slow start, and between the rising tension over the initial threat vs the new threat/s that reveal themselves, the game is always throwing curveballs at you to make sure you never feel safe.

The underground setting works perfectly for this style of tense thriller/horror, and the main cast being marines is not only a great way to allow some really cool scenes that are believable and make sense (due to equipment/training..etc) but also enhances the fear of the big bad because if these guys are scared, then I'm fucked.

The larger reveals near the end were just the right amount of horror movie crazy without leading into ridiculous or wacky territory, and the way the story unfolds is superb. Not only do you never feel safe, but every time you think you know what's happening, well maybe you don't know quite as well as you thought huh, punk.

Really happy I got back on this series. I'm not sure if I could say this is as good as The Quarry, if only because that game's cast and runtime allowed for more of the good stuff I like, but this isn't far behind at all for me.

Definitely recommend, if you only play one game from the anthology, make it this one.

To preface this review: I'm not really an avid racing game player nor have I ever even heard of this series beyond mindlessly scrolling past it on the storefront. This is from the perspective of a complete noob. When I play racing games I usually go for the more arcade-y stuff like Burnout or Split/Second and the Need for Speed Games. Basically the less focused it is on being a simulator the more fun I have. Driving around is always my favorite part in open world games and so nothing bores me more than a dozen mechanics and driving around some sterile track. That seems to be a lot of racing games these days though and so I usually avoid them. Much like fighting games they're a genre I don't particularly like but every now and then I just randomly decide to play one and get hooked on it and too addicted to play anything else until I get tired of it. I was starting to crave that for a racing game and then as I was scrolling through all the games that came out this year I saw this! Something that came and went this year seemingly without much buzz or recognition and didn't get many good reviews, but had a short story mode. It was perfect.

I do need to confess to a terrible thing I had to do to play this though. I wasn't just gonna pay its full price for a game I knew very little about so I had to make a deal with the devil. Don't condemn me, I feel bad about it enough. But I bought a month of EA Play. A terrible, horrible thing. I tried to justify it saying "ill use it to get a discount on the Dead Space remake or Need for Speed Unbound" but the truth is I just really fucking wanted to try this random ass racing game because it would make me feel better about not beating enough 2022 games this year. And what I got was well, pretty surprising.

This game actually has a very interesting mix between the two different types of racing games. On one hand its a very forgiving game not muddled with a bunch of different mechanics, but still gives you a bit of a challenge in the way you control your vehicle and that classic organized racing kind of vibe. It's not particularly what I like but if you're someone who loves the feeling of being in big (mostly) formal races without a whole lot of technical junk thrown at you you might get a good kick out of this one. I did find the lack of explanations for a lot of its mechanics to be a little frustrating but as mentioned the game is still pretty forgiving. A sort of easy to learn hard to master kinda deal.

The story, for a racing game, was enjoyable. Obviously things are really limited when its a game you are entirely restricted to your car in but what it does is nice. It uses live action scenes (much more effectively than a certain other series, thank god for the rebranding with Unbound) in a documentary like way. A tv crew is filming the characters. It's pretty nice actually. The acting is solid for the most part and some of the characters are pretty enjoyable, particularly Valentin. The actual story itself is basically nothing and the
"villains" are weaksauce however they do succeed at being extremely unlikeable. Legends does actually have a certain bit of charm to it however and Id say I liked it. Where the story fails however is that it has a really huge disconnect from the gameplay itself. Let me explain.

Difficulty balancing in racing games has always been a bit of an issue for me. Rubberbanding when used right can make every race feel tight and like a close one but more often than not it just makes the game feel cheap and unfair. Conversely if the game is too easy it becomes far more boring at a really rapid pace, which is a huge issue for this game. Most of the difficulty comes from navigating the tracks themselves and getting used to the different type of vehicles you drive. The AI is total garbage and you'll likely pass each and every one of them with relative ease. This means a lot of the game didn't feel like a racing game at all and more just a driving game where you try to turn tight corners all sad and alone. This is amplified even more when some races decide they want to be an agonizing 4 to 6 laps long and sometimes upwards of 10 minute levels that just feel like they're stretching the campaign length as much as they can. Where this comes into the story is that even for a shitty driver who bumps into everything like I, I basically never once lost a race. But the story doesnt change at all with that. So there were multiple cutscenes where despite the player character absolutely crushing everyone in every single match, you have a teammate bragging about being the number one of your crew or the villain characters saying they've been slam dick dunkin' all year and aren't worried about any competition. You could count this as arrogance but even in some scenes the sportscasters announce all the villains win yet again or how your character apparently had a crash inbetween levels. Its basically the racing game equivalent of whittling the boss down to 1HP like a pro and then the cutscene after showing your whole party crying half dead on the floor. I'm not gonna pretend to know jack fuck about game development but considering all the cutscenes are on the same small handful of steps surely it would be worth filming at the bare minimum slightly alternate scenes to reflect how well you're actually doing in the story mode. As is I really wanted to enjoy the story for what it was but stuff like that made it very hard to take seriously or get invested in.

Overall, I'd feel bad for giving GRID Legends a harsh score. While its true that its underwhelming and too easy to be exciting, It was the perfect little distraction to hold me over for a few hours and I really appreciate the attempt at making a hybrid of the two big racing game subgenres. Maybe next time guys. If you like this type of game, it's worth your time. Just get it at a steep discount and definitely not from EA Play lol. Thanks for reading <3

Trophy Completion - played on alt account huehue
Nancymeter - 55/100
Game Completion #134 of 2022
October Completion #11

Didn't get to play this much because my internet is horse cock but like, what were they even thinking? How did this game get delayed for over a year and STILL only release with TWO maps and some of the most unbalanced gameplay of all time!?!?! Even their roadmap only confirms one more map is coming. How do you expect to gain traction for your live service game when it takes an additional 18 months to come out past the game it was bundled with yet remains nearly identical to the beta! It's just baffling. A multiplayer RE game could be really fun but capcom just keeps fucking it up and yet still trying while learning almost nothing please just stop i'm begging you it's hurting.

I want to personally have a private conversation with the person who decided in a game where everything is an overpowered glass cannon that Jill Valentine should have one of the lowest health stats.

Nancymeter - finish it first/100

It's been quite a while since I've written a review, been a bit burnt out from this site. But Dying Light 2 felt like a good game to come back from. In a year where I've tried to buy every single big release, this was one of the ones I was perhaps the most excited for. I really enjoyed my time with the first game. How long this spent in development was a little worrying but the new features they promised sounded enticing and I was sure they would do a good job if they just focused on improving what they had accomplished already.

The launch of Dying Light 2 was a mess. I remember a twitter post promising "500 hours of content" and was Immediately a bit worried but still hopeful. And then launch happened. My initial impression was a bit mixed and as I played the bugs started to show more and more. I lost a lot of progress because things wouldnt load properly. Some scenes would be without dialogue, some missions wouldnt start. I ended up taking a really big break until I decided to try and finish it a month or so ago. I can say the state of this game has been improved a lot. It still lacks a lot of polish in some areas, especially with character models loading in with textures and the occasional no audio but it didnt feel like a chore to play anymore and I could focus on the good stuff.

For one, the parkour excellent. Im not really a fan of the upgrade system but all the moves you can do make things feel really amazing. The grappling hook is very limited but fun. Only issue is that everything costs a lot of stamina so if you wanna use stuff like the glider it limits a lot of creativity. I do recommend turning off the auto ledge grab setting as well as it makes the gameplay a lot smoother. The combat is okay. Enemies block a lot and the sound effects are really bad, but the gore is great and it is always satisfying to dropkick someone off a building. There is an interesting concept with the main character being infected and there's some scenes where that turns into really fun stuff. This is all limited to story though and tbf it would be very overpowered but to not even have it as a mechanic post game feels like a missed opportunity. Biggest gameplay disappointment for me though was the nighttime chases. Night time in the first game was downright scary but it felt really lackluster in this one. I had to run around in circles purposefully to try to get level 4 and it still took ages. The actual open world itself also feels okay. It gets a lot more interesting in the second area when more traversal options open up. The enemy density has been improved since release but at launch it felt like a ghost town. The side content is all kinda standard for the genre but its stll enjoyable and fits within the context of the game. I didnt get much out of the siding factions deal. I was gonna do cleanup but be warned that the game decides there should be a difficulty spike where it scales all enemies up a few levels if you decide to play postgame. This made things a bit more annoying for basically no reason so I decided to move on to other games.

Then there is the story. A lot of people say its terrible but to me it really wasn't. A large part of that is because I have been in love with Rosario Dawson ever since Men In Black II but also Idk, I enjoyed it? I thought the stuff with Frank and Hakkon and nightrunners was pretty interesting. It has some really good music in a few moments and I was quite pleased with the ending I got. The protag is kinda blank and I dont even remember his name but it didnt bother me much. I also liked the story in the first game which was also shat on though so take my thoughts with however much salt you'd like.

In the end, Dying Light 2 is a mess of a game. Its unpolished, had a middling launch, is definitely not gonna take 500 hours of your time even if you're diehard ... but still in the end I had a positive experience from it. I liked the characters and the parkour is as fun as ever. I know just about everyone is kinda over them but I will never not love zombie games. It should of been delayed but I'm glad it wasn't abandoned. I'm hopeful techland can make up for this with Dead Island 2 next year. Im not quite sure if its pre order worthy yet but I'll keep a close eye on it for next time.

Thanks for reading everyone. Up next I have some reviews for things like Rollerdrome, Bugsnax, Balan Wonderworld, Marvel's Avengers and Stray I've been neglecting. But we'll see how it goes, hopefully it doesnt take another month for y'all to hear from me lol. I appreciate your support < 3

Trophy Completion - 55% (33/58)
Time Played: 43 hours 35 minutes
Nancymeter - 73/100
Game Completion #131 of 2022
October Completion #8
Spooktober 2022 Game #5

So this game is pretty good. The atmosphere is still 10/10 and there is a good amount of weapon variety and freedom to explore and kill as you wish. Unfortunately the story isn't that interesting and I never felt particularly engaged with it, and despite the cool concept and setting the game doesn't really do a whole lot new compared to the second one. The final two levels also dragged a little length wise but It was still enjoyable to play and both the ending and adorableness of the little sister makes up for it.

Game #2 of the Nancyfly Spooktober 2021 games list

A simple concept executed perfectly.
The frantic pace of the gameplay perfectly complements the mercilessly realistic setting: you strive to do your job as an immigration officer efficiently because it truly feels like your life and your family's depend on it, and you hold my breath every time you let someone through in fear of a dreaded citation.
Papers, Please's world is bleak for everyone, and you're constantly reminded of that through some unique characters the game throws your way every so often, who each struggle to get by just as you do. They also serve to remind you that you aren't just dealing with some nameless NPCs; all of your actions and decisions as an immigration officer affect other people's lives, and you're given complete freedom on what to do with them. Help someone out illegally out of compassion, detain people or not for the slightest irregularity, collaborate with a secret group aiming to weaken the country's regime, etc.
Even from a purely presentation standpoint this game is incredible, the pixel art is beautiful and very detailed, the interface is clean and heavily promotes finding your own way to manage it, the sprites are all memorable. The fact that there are a grand total of two music tracks in the whole game and all you hear most of the time are just the diegetic sounds of people in line, documents being shuffled around and your own character's tensed breathing just further adds to the incredible atmosphere.
By the way there are 20 endings in total which all depend on your choices, by beating the game once I've only barely scratched the surface of how it can be played.

Papers, Please is fucking brilliant. Glory to Arstotzka.

Score: 10

I hate the ocean. I also love the ocean. Mostly because of sharks. I love and hate those too. So a game where I can play as the shark safely from my "own home" was very nice. Maneater is a game with repetitive collectibles, repetitive objectives and very repetitive combat but somehow even with all of that it still just works. Its goddamn fun to be a shark and eat things.

The game starts off a bit frustrating. Everything is aggressive, you have barely any health or upgrades. Its a mess. I was having a pretty bad time the first one or two hours I played this. But the game has a good sense of progression as you evolve and get new abilities, it becomes a lot easier. Maybe a bit too easy, but you're a fuckin shark everything should be easy for you. You really start feeling like the apex predator of the sea. When the game opens up a little to deeper waters in the Sapphire Bay area, especially if you're swimming at night the sense of atmosphere is impeccable. Like you are the monster in horror b-movie. I love it.

The game is setup like you're in a nature documentary tv show, and I bet a lot of people probably didnt like this angle but I think it adds a lot of character to the game. The narrator is great and hes usually pretty funny. He also has a lot of lines, so he won't really be repeating stuff as much as you'd assume - unless you're getting the cache collectibles which there are like a hundred of - thats the only time he bothered me. Definitely helps the game a lot and adds to the not quite so serious tone you can see from the numerous easter eggs and visual gags under the waters surface.

The story is just a tale of revenge from two sides. You want to eat Scaly Pete because he killed your mother and he wants to kill you because you bit off his arm. Its obviously not riveting but it fits the game well and gives you something to work towards. Most of the objectives just have you going around either eating groups of humans or specific fish, or hunting targets and other apex predators of their specific locations, slowly getting stronger until you finish the missions in an area and move on to the next or unlock the next story event. You definitely are gonna want to seek out the collectibles as they give you nutrients and such needed to upgrades as well as unlock the upgrades themselves. Theres three main evolution lines you can follow, and you can mix and match the different parts yourself to create the ultimate maneater of your desires. Its not super in depth but as it changes the visuals of your shark as well as bonuses its a good mechanic.

I only really have two complaints with this game. Sure its a bit repetitive but that never bothered me as it was still always fun to collect and eat everything. I just feel like more mission types would of benefited a lot. Stuff like races even would've gone a long way. I am not sure what the DLC adds but I am definitely gonna get it in the future, but I also wish there was just more in general. The Gulf and Sapphire Bay areas are the largest and just swimming in the open water was so cool. I really wish there were more areas like that to explore. The ocean has so many cool creatures and even biomes in of itself that I would just love to swim around in. This game does have good variety - things from orcas to sperm whales to hammerheads to alligators, but I still feel like theres just so much more out there that could be featured in a game like this as well. A deep trenches location would be like the coolest shit ever. Like I said at the start of this review. I hate the ocean. It scares the shit out of me. But thats also why Im so fascinated by it. Thats why I hope this game gets a sequel that gives us even more to explore. Id pre order the fuck out of that.

In the end, Maneater may not be a game that lived up to its full potential, but I took the bait and it got me hooked. With this and things even like Stray, I am very hopeful for more animal games lol. I honestly can see myself even replaying this on the side with the ps5 version because its just that fundamentally awesome to be a shark.

Trophy Completion - 100% (Platinum #217)
Time Played: 11 hours 51 minutes
Nancymeter - 79/100
Game Completion #119 of 2022
September Completion #9

Strangely enough, this game made me realise that the other games in the series were actually better than I'd given them credit for. That's not to say that this entry is bad per se, but it switched things up just enough to make me realise just how much I prefer the way they were before.

For whatever reason, throughout the entire game the weapons felt weak. Even during the tutorial it was taking more shots to put enemies down than it felt like it should've been. Furthermore the lack of marking just makes everything a lot harder than it was probably meant to. In fact a lot of the combat just didn't really feel good at all.

I acknowledge that I played this game "wrong" so I'll make that clear here, this title is very much an attempt at a Far Cry RPG, with the weapons having levels and such with damage that scales accordingly. So by beelining the plot and only doing enough outposts to upgrade my homebase to the required level, I wasn't exactly kitted out by the endgame.

The problem is, through some miracle, neither were my enemies? The penultimate mission sees you fighting the main antagonists - The Twins - and using Level 3 weapons (only 1 shy of the max) it took me an absurd amount of time to kill each of them. Headshots dealing 300 damage and I swear it felt like that had 50,000hp each or something. Not to mention the steady flow of dogs that just appear out of nowhere, grabbing your arm before I could hear them even playing with headphones. But when I finally did kill one and take her weapons, they were level 1? Despite killing me in 4 hits? Bruh

My partner says she had no trouble with this fight at all and that they even went down quickly so this seems to have been my own problem, but idk, I was playing it like a Far Cry game, not like an RPG. Foolish? Maybe. But it hadn't really been an issue until this fight, and it wasn't one for the finale boss either.

That aside, the AI was pretty annoying and this is a really weird thing to mention but the subtitles are so awful. They're not structured at all so any breaks between words or sentences aren't represented. To use an example that hopefully translates well, rather than:
"I'm not trapped in here with you...
You're trapped in here with me" displayed as 2 lines, synced up to the dialogue to show the pause in between them, this game would subtitle it more like:
"I'm not trapped in here with
you. You're trapped in here with me"
and the second line probably wouldn't even show until they were saying the word 'trapped' like bruh

Anyway, besides nitpicking and my own errors the game is alright. I really like the premise of showing Hope County years after the events of 5 but personally for me they changed too much for me to enjoy it nearly as much as I did its predecessor. The twins are fairly interesting and the music/aesthestic is cool, I just couldn't really get into it unfortunately.

I wish I could give this game the lengthy, detailed review that it deserves, but unfortunately my memory doesn't allow for that, so this will have to do.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a perfect game, held back by it's own perfectionism. It works so hard to make everything feel as good as it possibly can that as a result there's simply too much. It took me over 3 years to complete this, and as someone who can easily bash out a 150-hour JRPG in a month or two, that really says something.

Now obviously I wasn't playing it consistently, not after the first 3 months. But seriously.. 3 months! To reach the Epilogue! For 3 months I played this game - and this was back when I used to pick a single thing and play that in basically all of my free time. Granted I spent a lot of that time doing optional activities, but even considering that the game is just SO, BIG.

I remember coming back after around 6 months and deciding to finally get through the Epilogue one weekend while I was visiting my mum over Christmas. About 15 hours later I'd barely scratched the surface of Part 2. (Yep, that's right. Even the fkn Epilogue is 2 parts long!)
After that, it was a hefty 3 year break, playing for maybe an hour once or twice in between before fully committing to beating it recently.

The point I'm trying to make - quite fittingly in the most roundabout way possible - is that this game is by all means incredible. The attention to detail is unmatched, the cast and story are superb, and the fact that Rockstar did all this to set up RDR1 ... They went so far beyond the call it's laughably impressive.

But alas, it's just too much. I'm giving this game a 5/5 because it absolutely deserves it. But unfortunately Rockstar's tedious game design and absolutely insane scale of everything in it means that I, personally, had to experience it in such a way that by the time the credits rolled, everything prior to the Epilogue was already a fading memory. And that kinda sucks.

I would love to replay this game in a more appropriate way, start to finish without years-long breaks. Maybe some day..
(My gf is definitely gunna make me watch her play it once a year eventually though it's fine huehue)

I finally did it, my first mainline SMT game. And it was..... decent? Good even. I'd hesitate to say more than that but Its obviously not a bad game by any means (besides one thing but we'll get to that). I want to preface this by saying I dont really care for turn based combat, and for the most part I play games for character and story. Surprisingly, the gameplay was pretty enjoyable in this. I played on the lowest difficulty setting because again, not really a fan of turn based but it was honestly quite enjoyable putting 90% of my points into strength and just blasting through everything with high critical hit phys moves. The UI is really clean, no problems there beyond my usual bleh turnbased qualms. The semi-open world is a great idea, and seeing the monsters in the overworld made the game a lot more enjoyable than a bunch of random encounters. Exploring was really fun for the most part and whenever Nahobino does his little slide down a slope thing that always made me do an internal fist pump. It's the best part of the game I think. The map is awful though, I had a better time ignoring it outside of the general waypoint direction and just wandering around on my own. The map is a lot more useful in the two (thankfully few) dungeons but those areas are mostly just copy paste textures everywhere and the least enjoyable parts of the game easily. Part of the reason the exploration was as enjoyable is going back to what I said earlier, the overworld sprites. The demon designs, which yes a lot are from previous games, are just really fucking sick. Almost all of them are certified dope and SMTV is honestly the best looking game ive played on switch so that only enhanced everything. I hope the next games build off that. Then theres the music. The second half of the game the music is pretty great, and the credits music is awesome as well. But I really hated it for the first two areas, idk what was up but it honestly was hurting my ears and i had to play with the sound off outside of battle for some parts. Now that settles everything, yep nothing else to discuss. Pretty good game....... Nope.

I cant

the story sucks balls

The section in the school, and the meeting between the gods. Those were the only two moments in the game where the story was interesting. Aogami was a decent character, everyone else besides design wise is entirely uninteresting and lack anything beyond surface level depth. They're not likeable, you wont care about them. Depending on your ending you'll kill some of them and you wont feel a damn thing. The first half of this game is focused on an enemy that has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story and by the time it gets intriguing its basically already over. The endings themselves are also really anticlimatic. Theres no real sense of accomplishment and it just kinda ends with a dissapointing fizzle. I heard a lot about the allignment stuff from the rest of the series, but the only choice you make that even matters is at the very end. The story is just really bad, not atrocious necessarily but theres just really not much to enjoy there and it took away from the fun of playing to know I was heading towards a lackluster story with an uninteresting conclusion.
Overall. The story is not worth a second thought and I dont think the game as a whole is very memorable, that being said they really got a good thing going with the environments and exploration.

Time Played - 33 hours 23 Minutes
Final Level - 81
Nancymeter - 73/100
Game Completion #37 of 2022
April Completion #6